Redpill me on China.

I'm happy to expand with context and Cool China Facts, but you're actually asking the wrong question and that's the most important issue.

Implicit in your question is a simple idea: is China Good or is China Bad? And further: if you were to rack up Good Things in China and compare them to Baf Things in China, would it end up with China Good or China Bad?

This is a liberal approach to understanding states, nations, the people within them, and the factions among them, and usually conflates all four: is the entire country, as if it were a person with agency, good or bad?

The reality will actually be that all of these categories have different facets and interactions. As an entire country in the real world, there will be good things and bad things and nuanced things and things that are bad but not as bad as elsewhere and things that are good but not as goof as elsewhete. And, most importantly, how is it positioned within the global geopolitical context, what is its trajectory, and what influence does it have on other nations and the overall system of capitalism. Because if you look at it that way, you will find that the forces opposed to China have been dominant white supremacist colonizers responsible for historical and ongoing monstrosities far beyond what a China Watcher will exaggerate and simplify and get racist about, and that China is offering a path to multipolarization that will and does shield other countries from the horrors of American (capital) hegemony.

So, this is all a preview to say that you should expect these things:

• Bad Things can happen in China. It's a country of over a billion people grappling with its own challenges and development. It's a country with peoplr and history, not a fantasy world of exactly how some Westerner thinks everything should be.

• Don't forget that a lot of those Bad Things are mostly propaganda.

• Don't forget to contextualize the bad things in relation to what other actors are doing. A common propaganda tactic in the US, the most propagandized country, is to criticize and sanction other countries doing far milder versions of horrors repeatedly carried out by US Empire. The US killed off millions of Iraqis through sanctions and the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure and a Yemeni child dies from deprivation every minute due to the US-driven Saudi campaign. Keep that in mind when you hear Western critiques of their enemy's alleged islamophobia.

• Don't forget your own context. What purpose does being vocally negative about China serve? Thay is the actual intent of the propaganda. You're not going to make China better by getting a bunch of Westerners to hate it. You're going to help manufacture consent for sanctions and war, both of which are actually intended to maintain US hegemony at the expense of common people that you woulf supposedly being sympathizing with. It's fine to develop internal critiques, buy if you aren't aware of the propaganda or your audience, you will simply reinforce the violent xenophobic status quo.

As an example of the propaganda, every single example you mentioned is tied up in a military-state-industrial complex of propaganda sources, which you might not be aware of, and beyond that, are all fed to us through a lens of maximization of sinophobic angles and false attributions inherent to our media system. For example, most things that you "know" about the treatment of Uyghurs, if you follow Western sources, are curated by one homophobic, antisemitic weirdo that can't read or speak Chinese (Zenz) and some CIA cutout cutouts (two layers) of weird nationalists who in no way represent common opinions among Uyghur people, but are propped up by US State Department funding. So you must contend with the reality that your information here, that you used to form strong opinions, is probably garbage, and you will have to start from scratch with a media critical lens.

And what you should discover is that China's approach to extremism in Xinjiang is indeed heavy-handed and has negative aspects to it. It is also a reaction to increasing Wahhabist extremism and terrorism in the region where hundreds were being killed. Wahhabism is not traditional, in any way, to Uyghur culture, which is a unique turkic culture with a relation to islam and cultural practices that is very different from Western stereotypes. You'll also find that the destabilization of Afghanistan and weaponization of Wahhabists against China, in Xinjiang, has been on the US' radar for over a decade. The Chinese national-level government's response to this was to (1) directly combat non-traditional Wahhabist practices that oppress women and promote terrorism, and (2) promote economic development to support increasing urbanization and generally improve quality of life, as people with prospects are less radicalizable. This did mean, for example, compulsory attendance of courses to improve folks' understanding of Chinese, to develop practical skills, to get placed into jobs and industries where they can gain experience and bring that back to their own communities. There was monitoring of activities and behaviors for Wahhabist activity. There were some officials (remember, we are talking about real people) who engaged in abuse. There were indeed bad things, mixed in with a program that successfully reformed ascendant non-traditional violent and oppressive forces and improved the economic standing of the targeted group. And remember, both Uyghur and Mandarin are taught, not just one or the other.

Now consider the wider context. How have Western countries responded to (and promoted) Wahhabism? And, distinctly, how have they treated muslim people? We could spend all day discussing this, but consider that the response to a single terrorist attack was two wars of aggression where millions were killed or exiled (the people to be "liberated"), widespread islamophobia targeted at all brown people, a global system of sanctions and surveillance. Incomparable. The systematic destruction of peoples and cultures. And the weaponization of the reactions to those "interventions": Wahhabism itself, and related extremist islam-adjascent movements, are fostered by US proxies and used to destroy populations and designated enemies. ISIS emerged and thrived with US consent and was used against Syria and Kurdish breakaways. These situations were used for global recruitment, to provide real combat experience for extremists to take home for their own protects. This very much did happen re: Uyghurs in Xinjiang, there were active recruitment efforts to merge turkic and Wahhabist views to export folks to train in war against Syria and Kurdish breakaways, then return and carry out terrorist attacks to promote the creation of "East Turkestan", an invention of this group pf extremists with basically zero grounding in traditional Uyghur culture. These are the groups that carried out terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, these are the groups fostered by off-the-books US activities, these are the groups China responded to: a deliberate and funded attempt to break off an entire province of the country through the misery of its population and at odds with the vast majority of the people's positions and interests. Wings of these extremist groups were on the US' official lists of terrorist groups, only taken off so that they could be funded by the NED to push propaganda at Westerners.

And so we get to the intended impact of the Western response and propaganda. What have they pushed through, these people who "care" about Uyghurs?

• Sanctions targeting the development of civilian industry in Xinjiang. Agricultural and textile products, mostly. If successful, these would impoverish Uyghur people, not help them, and the propagandists are well aware of this. Victims of the propaganda are just their useful idiots who think they are helping human rights despite, in effect, contributing to a plan to make the targeted population miserable. Lies about slavery are projected onto "picking cotton", which the US actually did use chattel slavery to do, whereas Xinjiang is largely mechanized.

• Turning sentiment against China within the West. China is a competitor. US hegemony needs your consent to undermine China and these are planks in its platform.

• Promoting the aforementioned Wahhabist and related violent and oppressive groups, again with your manufactured consent. You have probably believed several lines that came directly from those odd ethnonationalist-with-transplanted-ideas groups funded by the NED. They are part of the same complex that killed a bunch of Uyghurs.

So, in summary:

• Reconfigure the scope of your view towards an entire country, as the simplistic narratives you've been told are sinophobic, orientalist, anticommunist propaganda that work primarily by telling you how to frame the question rather than informing you.

• Do media criticism if you want to have any chance of an accurate view of "enemies" designated by the West.

• Remember your own role in not contributing to manufacturing consent for war and deprivation, especially against the people you're supposedly sympathetic to. The situation in Ukraine has a corrolary here, where the West has been pushing hard to create the conditions of war for decades and is currently telling you to support a prolonged war effort at Ukrainians' expense, but characterizing it as support for Ukraine. It is very easy to do the exact opposite or your intent if you don't consider your position and audience.